The disclosures herein relate generally to information handling systems (IHSs), and more specifically, to IHSs that employ prefetching to increase performance.
An information handling system (IHS) includes a processor that accesses executable code in main memory to process that code. Using hardware prefetching, the processor may load instructions from main memory before the processor actually needs to execute these instructions. The processor may store these prefetched instructions in a fast internal cache or a fast external cache until the processor executes the instructions. This arrangement may speed up execution of instructions that the processor retrieves from main memory.
IHSs may also employ software prefetching to speed up the execution of instructions. In this approach, a person or a compiler may insert prefetch instructions in program code to effectively speed up a processor's access to instructions in main memory.